Björn Jeffery

I’m at Stanford! I’ll be holding a presentation at the Innovation Journalism conference later on today, but I wll also try to to live blog the conference as much as I can. Please check out the programme and let me know if there is anything specific that you want me to catch and I’ll try to write more about that.

The first session was from Stefan Andreasen, CEO and founder of Kapow Technologies. His topic was “Taking a European startup to the US – The Entrepreneur’s perspective”.

Not familiar with Kapow? Neither was I, even if it ringed a bell somewhere. Basically, what they do is help making mashups or create new relevant feed streams. Today, mashups are still difficult because of the lack of relevant API’s to use. So what Kapow does is to create RSS feeds and similar standardised formats automatically from a large variety of sources – directly from webpages or in databases. Sounded a bit like Yahoo Pipes, but you don’t have to have the initial RSS feeds. Clever.

Kapow started as Kapow.net – a one stop shopping site for real estate, cars, boats etc. Andreasen explained that they unfortunately were about five years ahead of its time, as real estate agents thought they were stealing their profits more than anything else. Because of this, the company died with the dotcom-death of 2000-2001. Fortunately they could reuse their technology to create a product which could be sold to Danske Bank and used the money to fund their new company, Kapow Technologies.

Making the shift over the Atlantic started when Kapow realised that all current partners, and potential partners, were to be found in California. Also, is was considerably easier to find investors when you are in a market where the growth potential is larger, i.e in a larger country.

Andreasen listed a few key points in finding the right investor:

Understanding of Danish/European culture
Understanding the US market
Transatlantic investor became the goal
Understanding of our market segment and our challenges
Show real involvement, “smart money”
Good Connections

The partner they found was Kennet, and with help from them they today have 75% of their business from the US.

Andreasen also listed a few lessons that he had learned from moving your company to the US:

Moving to the US has saved Kapow technologies
Having a “cultural fit” investor is key
Creating a new market segment is very difficult and things has moved slower than we anticipated
As the company grows it also outgrows what you before considered key employees
Not reading the market can be very costly
Beware of cultural differences
Even the most promising deal can turn out to be a failure

A good and humble presentation from a person who obviously knew what he was talking about. I’ll definitely be looking out for Kapow ahead.

* * *

Next up was Javier Rojas, Managing Director of Kennet that presented with the title “European Innovation & succeeding in the US – expansion strategies for European entrepreneurs.”

Kennet Venture Partners is a VC firm focusing only on American and European innovation. They have moved several companies from Europe to the US, and are used to the problems that may occur. The companies that they look for have a revenue between 4-50 million US dollars. Usually their commitment is between 3 to 6 years.

An interesting point was when Rojas said that there will be a split in managing content and managing your audience. He argued that newspapers (and others) had to open up to other sources of content, and also let their content go to other hosts. Good point, even if I think it will take quite some time for the newspapers to accept. Rojas gave this a time frame of five years. For this, Kapows technology would be perfect, he argued.

As for the pure VC point of view, Rojas held a good presentation, but there was so many points being made that it was very difficult to keep up. He basically went through their entire investment logic in 20 minutes. Very interesting, but basically unbloggable. I’ll make a few summarizing points below to try to catch the main frame.

Rojas focused on one major challenge for the European markets: – it’s not homogenous, and therefore each country is insufficient in size to support a global vendor domestically. This creates a very expensive business environment. He gave an example of having three sales people that covered the entire US – one on each coast, and one in the middle. In Europe they had to have three people just to cover Great Britain and Germany. The equation for sales that he used was one salesperson for every 1.2 million US dollars revenue at 60% gross margin.

He continued to explain that entering the US market typically costs around 5-15 million US dollars. In order to be successful here Rojas emphasized the importance of having key management living in the US. A lot of European companies fail in not willing to relocate their management, and miss out on many opportunities because of that. For instance, having the VP Sales in US was essential Rojas said.

tags technorati : injo4 kapow kennet vc entrepreneur innovation

tags bloggar.se: injo4, kennet, kapow, riskkapital, entreprenör, innovation

Tomorrow I’ll being flying out to California to hold a presentation at the Stanford University Innovation Journalism conference. I’ll be in San Francisco until Sunday, and in San Jose until Wednesday after that. Unfortunately, these last two weeks have been so busy that my preparation is next to nothing. So if you know any interesting people you think I should meet – or if you perhaps live there yourself – please drop me a line. The only two places I know I’ll be at is the Björk concert and the Likemind breakfast.

One more thing – if you’re Swedish – stop over at What’s Next and listen to the latest podcast that Henrik, Eric and I participated in.

tags technorati : sanfrancisco sanjose conferences stanforduniversity bjork likemind whatsnext

tags bloggar.se: san francisco, san jose, konferenser, stanford, björk, likemind, whats next

One of the projects that I run on the side of Good Old, is a blog called Discobelle.net. It’s a music blog that has become quite influential in the genres that we cover. An interesting point is that we get a lot of American PR-agencies that try to get us to write about their artists. Americans, working through a Swedish blog, in order to reach an American public. The globalized internet at it’s finest.

But an even more interesting point is the one about the genre blog house, that we are partially credited for in the Wikipedia article (they’ve deleted the article now, I see). The term is some what derogatory and descriptive of the wide spread electro house that is posted on a lot of blogs these days.

In the discussion about whether to keep the article or not, the argument was brought up that there were no sources for the name, “Published sources would be helpful here” it said. Helpful perhaps, but not realistic or even relevant as this is a phrase coined in an online conversation (probably here). It’s hard to trace back to one single person. And why would a “published” source make more credible than anything else?

One of my all time favourites, Edward de Bono, makes the point that good ideas can be created easier with certain methods. And while using these methods, it’s not entirely clear who came up with the idea as there are so many people participating in different ways. It is not important either – as long as the idea is truly good and solves the problem that you have. It’s the same thing with phrases, or a lot of other things, if you ask me.

In all these ongoing conversations; ideas, phrases and thought streams are presented daily. I read something interesting, and then perhaps I blog about it adding my thoughts to the original. Someone else reads my blog post and writes their own. They add to it again, and puts together a snappy way of presenting it. Now who owns this idea?

I question the whole idea of claiming ownership of something that was born inbetween people. It’s just not an important factor any more. In a conversation centred society, old rules concerning copyright and relevant sources can hardly apply any more. Too bad the world’s most progressive encyclopedia can’t lead the way here.

tags technorati : wikipedia copyright conversations discobelle bloghouse

tags bloggar.se: wikipedia, konversationer, copyright, discobelle, blog house

For being a semi-corporate blog, I rarely write about what I actually work with. Those of you that follow my Jaiku get the picture, but hardly any results. I thought I’d just quickly mention two projects that I have been involved with lately.

If anyone has missed it, I work as an internet strategist at a communication agency called Good Old. We work with both strategy and production within digital media, focusing mainly on media companies at the moment.

The first project I thought I’d mention is the new supplement Fredag for the daily newspaper Corren. I worked together with Anna Lindberg in shaping the concept, focusing on how to get closer to the student community and involve the readers on an editorial level. The result landed on my desk a few days ago and turned out really well. An unusually non-digital project, but there you go. We had loads of ideas for web and mobile as well, but they had to wait for a while. (and if my E70 wasn’t so troublesome you would have had a few pictures as well)

The other project is for Sydsvenskan, a daily newspaper here in Malmö. I assisted in developing a tv-concept around Margret Atladottir that was recruited from a competitor. The first test show has aired and can be seen here. It’s going to take a while to find the exact right approach, but I’m convinced this will be one of the most popular features of the site pretty soon.

tags technorati : corren sydsvenskan newspapers media goodold

tags bloggar.se: corren, sydsvenskan, dagstidningar, media, good old

I moved to Sweden from London when I was three years old. My mother had been talking Swedish to me all the time, but I hadn’t quite caught on yet. So when I started at a play school, there were some communication issues. None that couldn’t be resolved of course – three year-olds tend not to be that picky anyway. The teachers at the play school taught me Swedish as we went along.

The other day I got an email. It was from one of my old teachers. She had found me through googling the names that are published with the Sudokus in GP (we make them!). She thought that she recognised my surname, and then managed to work out that it was the same little boy that once came to stay with them all these years ago.

I’m still thinking about what to answer her. It’s like a circle somehow.

Sometimes I think the shift to Society 2.0 is driven by the wrong incentives. When I hold presentations for companies, the fact that they often pick up on is that people do things for “free”. Sometimes you can see it in their eyes – “oh! if the users to all the work we don’t have to pay! bring it on, web 2.0!”. You know what I mean; the whole (tiresome) UGC-discussion.

I think this is a complete misconception of the situation, as this would imply that there are hoards of users just waiting in line to help companies cut their costs. This is, obviously, not the case (but if it was that would indeed be a revolution in itself). People are people primarily, not users. This is not going to change in a foreseeable future.

The confusion occurs because there is no monetary transaction. That doesn’t mean it’s free. You still have to offer something in return, but in another currency that is equally accepted on the internet. There are many different types that can be considered. Here’s a few that I’ve thought of:

Content: Barter deals with articles or services. Common in old media as well.

Traffic: The Technorati deal with Washington Post. Blog about one of their articles and get paid with a traffic directing link back.

Enhanced user experience: Upcoming.org – add the events that you are interested in, and get recommendations in return.

Trust: Adding information or customisation to make the service more adjusted to you, and thus more trustworthy. Netvibes is a good example. Head over to Trustmojo for more qualified thoughts on the matter of trust.

Identity: Adding content to strengthen the persons online identity in that arena. See any working community for this.

Values: Wikipedia – the dream of a free encyclopedia for everyone, world wide.

Exposure: Add yourself doing something in order to get exposure – receive either ridicule or fame. See American Idol or FejmTV.

Brand loyalty: People that love a brand or a company so much that they are willing to help them. Lego made use of this while developing their new Mindstorms series.

Money: Still works of course, Revver for instance.

Although I don’t have a formula on how one relates to another in terms of amount, there probably could be one. It would be very blunt, but still. If nothing else it would be a good way to show all these companies that are offering absolutely nothing, money or otherwise, to their users. They are in for a surprise if they think their corporate wikis are going to be filled with spectacular and free content.

I have suggested this topic for Reboot9, and also added my presentation on Old Media vs New Media. If you think they sound interesting, please login and click the “i like it” button.

tags technorati : society2.0 internetcurrency currency

tags bloggar.se: society 2.0, internetvaluta, valuta

Two Swedish articles of note this weekend that I thought I should say something about. Commentary in English about articles in Swedish, hmm. Is it pointless as the readers that only understand English can’t read the original article? I hope not, but perhaps it is. Should I have two separate feeds perhaps or maybe just leave the Swedish stuff alone? Please give me some feedback on this.

Anyway, article time:

Svenska Dagbladet about Society 2.0. Twitter, Flickr and all that. Also mentions Superlocal that I met the other day. The article is a good summary for people that have no idea this is going on, and presents it as a sociological phenomenon, which it of course is.

Erik has excellent and insightful comments about why micro is micro, and if perhaps it would have been different if it could have been. Good point indeed, the technical limitations of sms and similar stuff will have that effect. No different from printing really, when you think about it. The length of printed articles are highly correlated to the size of the magazine, and the way it is edited. But when this becomes standard practice, our expectations follow suit and we want the articles in that format to feel secure. Same thing with sms/im/jaiku if you ask me. It started as a limitation, now it’s just a form of communication that people feel at ease with.

The second article is from Expressen, and about Second Life. It’ amazing how many people are getting things wrong regarding this – it’s almost as if it’s meta-cool to hate on SL for being hype, rather that actually analysing what is being done – and what can be done. And what it is a sign of, as well.

The point of the article is that the Swedish Institute are wasting their money on building an embassy in a place where there’s nothing but porn and gambling. And hardly any people, apparently.

The article quotes one of my clients, Anders Olofsson at Sydsvenskan. He says that Second Life might not even be around in a few years time. What they don’t quote him on, but that I’m pretty sure that he said, is that it might be replaced by something else, but that the trend of the internet becoming 3D in many aspects is substantial. That didn’t make the cut apparently. It’s not important whether Second Life is around or not, websites don’t look the same today as they did 1995 either. But there was value in being online then anyway. You learned stuff. About behaviour, expectations and people. Don’t even get me started on the PR value this has had – let’s see you get that for 400 000 SEK any other way.

Porn and gambling they say. True. But seen from a biz perspective – this is a good thing, because it means there is business to be made here. Those types of businesses tend not to chose communication channels for the mere sociological value. These are the two industries that were on the forefront with the internet, DVDs and mobile phones. They understand business models, no matter what one might think about them from a moral point of view.

The internet was, and still is, riddled with porn. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing of value in virtual worlds for regular companies and brands. Quite the opposite.

tags technorati : society2.0 second life expressen media svenskadagbladet

tags bloggar.se: society 2.0, expressen, svenska dagbladet, second life

I’m absolutely worn out after a long and inspiring day. For those of you that couldn’t be there: Onelinr-backchannel, Flickr photos, Podesk videos, a good text summary from Citizen Media Watch and podcasts from What’s Next.

Thanks to everyone – today was a good example of both great speakers, great audience and a great organising team. And I was pleased about my new presentation as well, I hope there will be time to hold a more comprehensive version of it soon.

tags bloggar.se: hej2007, konferenser

Tomorrow, Saturday, I will be talking at the Hej! 2007 conference in Stockholm (Other upcoming keynotes here!). The topic is “Old Media vs New Media”, and hopefully it will go okay. It’s a new presentation so I’m a bit nervous actually – the crowd feels a bit tougher than usual 🙂 Or more knowledgeable anyway.

If you’re there, please come by and say hello. The list of registered guests is really impressive so I’m sure we’d have a lot to talk about.

tags bloggar.se: hej2007, konferenser

Attention all Malmö-people: Please swing by Solde at 9 am tomorrow as it is Likemind, as usual. Free coffee from Anomaly and really nice people – like you. If you don’t live in Malmö but like the sound of it anyway, check out the list to find your nearest city.

Unfortunately I won’t be there myself (I’m in Milan!), but Olof and Tomas will take care of you.